WWE held its latest investors’ conference call last Thursday and featured one caller ask Vince McMahon about All Elite Wrestling. The caller asked if he viewed AEW as the same kind of competition the WWF faced back in the 90s with WCW and if their success could somehow benefit WWE (using the old expression of “rising tides lift all boats”). McMahon promptly squashed that idea, saying, “Well, it certainly is not a situation where ‘rising tides’ because that was when Ted Turner was coming after us with all of Time Warner’s assets as well. That was a different situation. AEW is where they are. I don’t really know what their plans are, all I know is what our plans are. I don’t consider them competition in the way that I would consider WCW back in the day, not anywhere near close to that.”
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He then trailed off while delivering a rather explosive line — “And I’m not so sure what their investments are as far as their talent is concerned, but perhaps we can give them some more.”
Chris Jericho, whose history in WWE is extensive, was asked to give his thoughts on that while speaking with Inside The Ropes this week. The “Demo God” fired back by bringing up how the “Wednesday Night Wars” ended with NXT moving to Tuesday nights.
“Well, what else is he going to say? You know, and to respond to that, we don’t see WWE as competition. And he was smart to say that,” Jericho began. “”We’re not worried about what WWE is and we haven’t been since day one. We weren’t worried about what NXT did. The whole time with the NXT vs. AEW war, which ended in a total abysmal failure for NXT, we never once had a TV screen watching what they were doing when we were doing it. We didn’t know what segments they were in. We didn’t know any of that. Now, the WWE way is you’re watching what the competition is doing when they were on, we didn’t do that.
“And it was no disrespect,” he continued. “We just didn’t care. We were too busy worrying about our own company and about our own stories, and about our own show to care what anybody else is doing. And that’s one of the reasons why we did so well is that we were concentrating on AEW, not anything else.”
